On the coexistence of money and higher-return assets and its social role

This paper adopts mechanism design to tackle the central issue in monetary theory, namely, the coexistence of money and higher-return assets. I describe an economy with pairwise meetings, where fiat money and risk-free capital compete as means of payment. Whenever fiat money has an essential role, any constrained-efficient allocation is such that capital commands a higher rate of return than fiat money.Monetary theory